[ARTHUR] It seems that I am back on-list again, so here is a response to another chunk of Stevanâs response. I find it interesting to argue with Stevan, because we are both on the same side of wanting OA as soon as possible and believing it is well overdue. If I can characterise the debate, Stevan wants to keep it focused obsessively on ID/OA institutional repositories (which I believe from his recent comments he would now characterize as just a subclass of the Green Road), whereas I have become convinced that this approach will not suffice in my lifetime and think we should pursue a multi-factorial approach (which includes my Titanium Road).
 Here are my responses interspersed after selected bits of Stevanâs last post. I have tried to condense this because otherwise no-one will read it. My apologies to him if I quote him out of context. Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconstruct a reply email from the archive. I have done my best.  On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Arthur Sale <ahjs at ozemail.com.au> wrote:  *** > > ** The more important issue is that I have failed to get across to him > that the Titanium Road has nothing to do with researcher voluntarism. >  Volunteerism means that *in order to make their papers OA, researchers have to do something that they are not currently doing*, of their own accord, not because of an institutional or funder requirement.  Using new tools, voluntarily, is volunteerism.  [ARTHUR] This is more word-play and inventing a definition. A volunteer has clear options: to volunteer to do something, or do nothing at all. âVolunteerâ is not the same as âchoose between optionsâ. It may be useful to look at the origin of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary: the primary meaning is that of someone who volunteers for military service, as opposed to those who have no choice. Or do not have to choose. Researchers who self-archive in an institutional repository are either volunteers or conscripts. Users of Titanium Road apps are neither.   > The Green Road also does, because the researcher has to volunteer to > undertake unnatural extra work to deposit works in the institutional > repository through a clunky interface. >  The volunteer step in Green OA self-archiving is: Choosing to self-archive.  [ARTHUR] We both agree on that: volunteering to do the extra work in self-archiving.  The "clunkiness" of the interface is a technological matter. Not everyone would agree that filling out a few obvious form-interface fields (login, password, author, title, journal, date, etc.) is so "clunky" or "unnatural" in a day when we are filling out online forms all the time. It's just a few minutes' worth of keystrokes.  But my friend Arthur is profoundly mistaken if he thinks that the reason why over 80% of researchers are *not* voluntarily self-archiving today is because they find it too "clunky" to do the keystrokes.  [ARTHUR] But is it the reason they overwhelmingly give up after having been persuaded to try it?  I wish it were that simple. But in fact there are at least 38 reasons researchers why do not voluntarily self-archive -- http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#38-worries -- and their worry that doing so might be "clunky" is just one of them (and usually based on never even having tried it out).  [ARTHUR] See above. Frankly I resent being characterized at complaining about keystrokes, when the Titanium Road has little to do with keystrokes. It is about âdoing what comes naturally.â  [omitted, more keystroke rhetoric.]  [ARTHUR] I have to waste time answering this. Simplifying things to keystrokes is inappropriate. It *is* just extra work. I know it takes me 5 minutes extra, but that is 5 minutes I could spend on other work things. That is volunteering. And for what? More citations in the cloud, which a researcher may not really be interested in? I do it willingly, but then I am pursuing a cause.  They even hate to deposit a version of the article that they have no > confidence in (the Accepted Manuscript). >  Arthur: Over 80% of researchers hate to deposit *any version at all*, and don't! Worries about versions are just one of the at-least 38 reasons researchers don't deposit, year upon year upon year.  And the point is that all 38+ reasons are groundless. But it is now evident that it is hopeless to try to persuade researchers of this, one by one, researcher by researcher, reason by reason, year upon year upon year.  That's why deposit has to be mandated. (That way, only researchers' funders and institutions need to be persuaded!)  [ARTHUR] Stevan, do you really think I need to be told this after my work all these years? The facts are, if you observe them, researchers DO care about versions. Where mandates are applied, they often ignore the Accepted Manuscript requirement in favour of the Version of Record. The VoR becomes restricted because it is the institutionâs liability not the researcherâs. Nobody complains. Nor do I expect them to. Open Access loses.  [ARTHUR] So, letâs summarize your argument: it is now evident that it is hopeless to try to persuade researchers, so instead let us persuade the key decision-makers in institutions, who are mostly ex-researchers, because there are fewer of them. The evidence is increasingly that this is not working either. This is probably because the decision makers see the liability landing in their laps.   > So few of them do it, and they backslide so easily, that the only solution > is to force them to do it (a mandate). Since mandates rely on persuasion of > key executives who are themselves usually ex-researchers and are > transitory, voluntarism is an intrinsic thread running through the Green > Road. >  You are quite right that persuading the key executives of research institutions and funders to adopt an OA self-archiving mandate is a substantial challenge. But I think time has shown that it is the challenge that can yield the greatest OA dividends, the fastest, and that it hence deserves far more time and effort now than pinning our hopes yet again on trying to promote the adoption of a new killer-app by researchers.  The volunteerism in question here, by the way, is *the volunteer stroking of keys by researchers*. Of course all human decisions, including institutional executive ones, are "free-willed" decisions. But casting that as just another variant of the OA voluntarism problem misses the fact that *it is individual researcher voluntarism that is failing*, and that persuading key executives to (voluntarily!) mandate researcher keystrokes is not quite the same thing.  Wendy Hall (Southampton), Tom Cochrane (QUT) and Bernard Rentier (Liege), after all, are "key executives", and they have chosen, of their own free will, to mandate the OA self-archiving (keystrokes).  One of the key objectives of EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) -- of which Bernard Rentier is Director (and Tom Cochrane is a Board member) -- is to advise their fellow key executives at other institutions worldwide on how to mandate the keystrokes that are the only thing that stands between us and 100% OA.  [ARTHUR] Some people have been persuaded, but pitifully few, after all these years. My observations of key executives suggest there is no likelihood of a landslide any time soon.  > > ** I liken the Titanium Road with the situation with Electronic Theses > and Dissertations (ETDs). Where universities mandate the deposit of an > electronic copy of the thesis, the deposit rate easily reaches completeness > (and I mean 100%, not the 80% or so ID/OA mandated articles sometimes > achieve). It never retreats from that. Why? Because the action required of > the graduating student is completely natural and theyâve always expected to > do it. The university simply says âinstead of depositing two bound copies > of your thesis with the university before graduating, give us one and an > electronic copyâ. Or in even more enlightened universities âjust give us > an > electronic copyâ. The student does what is asked, and is even happy that > copying the files to a CD or DVD is much, much easier than waiting for 100s > of pages to print, finding a binder who can do black card covers and gold > lettering, and paying for all of it. The success of ETD schemes is that > they are natural, and simply electronicize a function that is already part > of a PhD studentâs activity. >  This is alas where theorizing gets in our way:  The reason students deposit theses as mandated is *because deposit is mandated*. Volunteer deposit means unmandated deposit.  It doesnât. But I donât want you to succeed with a digression.  And the reason most researchers don't deposit is because *deposit is mandated by fewer than 200 institutions*, out of at least 10,000 worldwide! (see ROARMAP <http://roarmap.eprints.org/>).  Moreover, many of those first 200 mandates are wishy-washy ones<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/494-guid.html>, without a clear indication of what to do and how, and without any mechanism for monitoring compliance.  Not so with Tom Cochrane's or Bernard Rentier's ID/OA mandates at QUT and U Liege. And the Liege mandate model, the most effective one of all, *designates deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance assessment*: âinstead of mailing paper copies or emailing digital copies of your publications to the university for performance assessment, deposit one electronic copy in the institutional repositoryâ.  You, Arthur, are attributing the success to the fact that depositing is "natural."  But the real reason for the success is that it is mandatory (in both cases).  The Titanium Technology may prove quite natural to use, but to get everyone to use it, you would have to mandate it. That's certainly not in the cards. But mandating deposit is.  [ARTHUR] Again, you miss the point, Stevan. Sure ETD deposits are mandated. But the mandate is easy to get. The students donât complain because it is natural. The executive agree because it is natural.  [ARTHUR] I could argue that it would be as easy to get a key executive to âmandateâ the provision of a free Titanium Road licence to every researcher. No resistance, easy agreement. But I donât think that is necessary. Mendeley is free, to use an indicator of what the Titanium app will be.  [ARTHUR] Iâll stop here because this is already far too long. The rest of the harangue can wait for another day. Iâve got halfway through, and it is tiring to find the flaws in each argument. Keystrokes are not the issue. This argument does not take OA forward.  Best wishes  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia  [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ] _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
